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Last week, the Internet Association (“IA”) — a trade group representing some of America’s most dynamic and fastest growing tech companies, including the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay — presented the incoming Trump Administration with a ten page policy paper entitled “Policy Roadmap for New Administration, Congress.”

The document’s content is not surprising, given its source: It is, in essence, a summary of the trade association’s members’ preferred policy positions, none of which is new or newly relevant. Which is fine, in principle; lobbying on behalf of members is what trade associations do — although we should be somewhat skeptical of a policy document that purports to represent the broader social welfare while it advocates for members’ preferred policies.

Indeed, despite being labeled a “roadmap,” the paper is backward-looking in certain key respects — a fact that leads to some strange syntax: “[the document is a] roadmap of key policy areas that have allowed the internet to grow, thrive, and ensure its continued success and ability to create jobs throughout our economy” (emphasis added). Since when is a “roadmap” needed to identify past policies? Indeed, as Bloomberg News reporter, Joshua Brustein, wrote:

The document released Monday is notable in that the same list of priorities could have been sent to a President-elect Hillary Clinton, or written two years ago.

As a wishlist of industry preferences, this would also be fine, in principle. But as an ostensibly forward-looking document, aimed at guiding policy transition, the IA paper is disappointingly un-self-aware. Rather than delineating an agenda aimed at improving policies to promote productivity, economic development and social cohesion throughout the economy, the document is overly focused on preserving certain regulations adopted at the dawn of the Internet age (when the internet was capitalized). Even more disappointing given the IA member companies’ central role in our contemporary lives, the document evinces no consideration of how Internet platforms themselves should strive to balance rights and responsibilities in new ways that promote meaningful internet freedom.

In short, the IA’s Roadmap constitutes a policy framework dutifully constructed to enable its members to maintain the status quo. While that might also serve to further some broader social aims, it’s difficult to see in the approach anything other than a defense of what got us here — not where we go from here.

To take one important example, the document reiterates the IA’s longstanding advocacy for the preservation of the online-intermediary safe harbors of the 20 year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) — which were adopted during the era of dial-up, and before any of the principal members of the Internet Association even existed. At the same time, however, it proposes to reform one piece of legislation — the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”) — precisely because, at 30 years old, it has long since become hopelessly out of date. But surely if outdatedness is a justification for asserting the inappropriateness of existing privacy/surveillance legislation — as seems proper, given the massive technological and social changes surrounding privacy — the same concern should apply to copyright legislation with equal force, given the arguably even-more-substantial upheavals in the economic and social role of creative content in society today.

Of course there “is more certainty in reselling the past, than inventing the future,” but a truly valuable roadmap for the future from some of the most powerful and visionary companies in America should begin to tackle some of the most complicated and nuanced questions facing our country. It would be nice to see a Roadmap premised upon a well-articulated theory of accountability across all of the Internet ecosystem in ways that protect property, integrity, choice and other essential aspects of modern civil society.

Each of IA’s companies was principally founded on a vision of improving some aspect of the human condition; in many respects they have succeeded. But as society changes, even past successes may later become inconsistent with evolving social mores and economic conditions, necessitating thoughtful introspection and, often, policy revision. The IA can do better than pick and choose from among existing policies based on unilateral advantage and a convenient repudiation of responsibility.

In the wake of the recent OIO decision, separation of powers issues should be at the forefront of everyone’s mind. In reaching its decision, the DC Circuit relied upon Chevron to justify its extreme deference to the FCC. The court held, for instance, that

Our job is to ensure that an agency has acted “within the limits of [Congress’s] delegation” of authority… and that its action is not “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”… Critically, we do not “inquire as to whether the agency’s decision is wise as a policy matter; indeed, we are forbidden from substituting our judgment for that of the agency.”… Nor do we inquire whether “some or many economists would disapprove of the [agency’s] approach” because “we do not sit as a panel of referees on a professional economics journal, but as a panel of generalist judges obliged to defer to a reasonable judgment by an agency acting pursuant to congressionally delegated authority.

The DC Circuit’s decision takes a broad view of Chevron deference and, in so doing, ignores or dismisses some of the limits placed upon the doctrine by cases like Michigan v. EPA and UARG v. EPA (though Judge Williams does bring up UARG in dissent).

Whatever one thinks of the validity of the FCC’s approach to regulating the Internet, there is no question that it has, at best, a weak statutory foothold. Without prejudging the merits of the OIO, or the question of deference to agencies that find “[regulatory] elephants in [statutory] mouseholes,” such broad claims of authority, based on such limited statutory language, should give one pause. That the court upheld the FCC’s interpretation of the Act without expressing reservations, suggesting any limits, or admitting of any concrete basis for challenging the agency’s authority beyond circular references to “abuse of discretion” is deeply troubling.

Separation of powers is a fundamental feature of our democracy, and one that has undoubtedly contributed to the longevity of our system of self-governance. Not least among the important features of separation of powers is the ability of courts to review the lawfulness of legislation and executive action.

The founders presciently realized the dangers of allowing one part of the government to centralize power in itself. In Federalist 47, James Madison observed that

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system. (emphasis added)

The modern administrative apparatus has become the sort of governmental body that the founders feared and that we have somehow grown to accept. The FCC is not alone in this: any member of the alphabet soup that constitutes our administrative state, whether “independent” or otherwise, is typically vested with great, essentially unreviewable authority over the economy and our daily lives.

As Justice Thomas so aptly put it in his must-read concurrence in Michigan v. EPA:

Perhaps there is some unique historical justification for deferring to federal agencies, but these cases reveal how paltry an effort we have made to understand it or to confine ourselves to its boundaries. Although we hold today that EPA exceeded even the extremely permissive limits on agency power set by our precedents, we should be alarmed that it felt sufficiently emboldened by those precedents to make the bid for deference that it did here. As in other areas of our jurisprudence concerning administrative agencies, we seem to be straying further and further from the Constitution without so much as pausing to ask why. We should stop to consider that document before blithely giving the force of law to any other agency “interpretations” of federal statutes.

Administrative discretion is fantastic — until it isn’t. If your party is the one in power, unlimited discretion gives your side the ability to run down a wish list, checking off controversial items that could never make it past a deliberative body like Congress. That same discretion, however, becomes a nightmare under extreme deference as political opponents, newly in power, roll back preferred policies. In the end, regulation tends toward the extremes, on both sides, and ultimately consumers and companies pay the price in the form of excessive regulatory burdens and extreme uncertainty.

In theory, it is (or should be) left to the courts to rein in agency overreach. Unfortunately, courts have been relatively unwilling to push back on the administrative state, leaving the task up to Congress. And Congress, too, has, over the years, found too much it likes in agency power to seriously take on the structural problems that give agencies effectively free reign. At least, until recently.

In March of this year, Representative Ratcliffe (R-TX) proposed HR 4768: the Separation of Powers Restoration Act (“SOPRA”). Arguably this is first real effort to fix the underlying problem since the 1995 “Comprehensive Regulatory Reform Act” (although, it should be noted, SOPRA is far more targeted than was the CRRA). Under SOPRA, 5 U.S.C. § 706 — the enacted portion of the APA that deals with judicial review of agency actions — would be amended to read as follows (with the new language highlighted):

(a) To the extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewing court shall determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action and decide de novo all relevant questions of law, including the interpretation of constitutional and statutory provisions, and rules made by agencies. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, this subsection shall apply in any action for judicial review of agency action authorized under any provision of law. No law may exempt any such civil action from the application of this section except by specific reference to this section.

These changes to the scope of review would operate as a much-needed check on the unlimited discretion that agencies currently enjoy. They give courts the ability to review “de novo all relevant questions of law,” which includes agencies’ interpretations of their own rules.

The status quo has created a negative feedback cycle. The Chevron doctrine, as it has played out, gives outsized incentives to both the federal agencies, as well as courts, to essentially disregard Congress’s intended meaning for particular statutes. Today an agency can write rules and make decisions safe in the knowledge that Chevron will likely insulate it from any truly serious probing by a district court with regards to how well the agency’s action actually matches up with congressional intent or with even rudimentary cost-benefit analysis.

Defenders of the administrative state may balk at changing this state of affairs, of course. But defending an institution that is almost entirely immune from judicial and legal review seems to be a particularly hard row to hoe.

Judicial deference to agency decision-making is critical in instances where Congress’ intent is unclear because it balances each branch of government’s appropriate role and acknowledges the realities of the modern regulatory state.

To quote Justice Scalia, an unfortunate champion of the Chevron doctrine, this is “pure applesauce.”

The very core of the problem that SOPRA addresses is that the administrative state is not a proper branch of government — it’s a shadow system of quasi-legislation and quasi-legal review. Congress can be chastened by popular vote. Judges who abuse discretion can be overturned (or impeached). The administrative agencies, on the other hand, are insulated through doctrines like Chevron and Auer, and their personnel subject more or less to the political whims of the executive branch.

Even agencies directly under the control of the executive branch — let alone independent agencies — become petrified caricatures of their original design as layers of bureaucratic rule and custom accrue over years, eventually turning the organization into an entity that serves, more or less, to perpetuate its own existence.

Other supporters of the status quo actually identify the unreviewable see-saw of agency discretion as a feature, not a bug:

Even people who agree with the anti-government premises of the sponsors [of SOPRA] should recognize that a change in the APA standard of review is an inapt tool for advancing that agenda. It is shortsighted, because it ignores the fact that, over time, political administrations change. Sometimes the administration in office will generally be in favor of deregulation, and in these circumstances a more intrusive standard of judicial review would tend to undercut that administration’s policies just as surely as it may tend to undercut a more progressive administration’s policies when the latter holds power. The APA applies equally to affirmative regulation and to deregulation.

But presidential elections — far from justifying this extreme administrative deference — actually make the case for trimming the sails of the administrative state. Presidential elections have become an important part about how candidates will wield the immense regulatory power vested in the executive branch.

Thus, for example, as part of his presidential bid, Jeb Bush indicated he would use the EPA to roll back every policy that Obama had put into place. One of Donald Trump’s allies suggested that Trump “should turn off [CNN’s] FCC license” in order to punish the news agency. And VP hopeful Elizabeth Warren has suggested using the FDIC to limit the growth of financial institutions, and using the FCC and FTC to tilt the markets to make it easier for the small companies to get an advantage over the “big guys.”

Far from being neutral, technocratic administrators of complex social and economic matters, administrative agencies have become one more political weapon of majority parties as they make the case for how their candidates will use all the power at their disposal — and more — to work their will.

In reality…, agencies “interpreting” ambiguous statutes typically are not engaged in acts of interpretation at all. Instead, as Chevron itself acknowledged, they are engaged in the “formulation of policy.” Statutory ambiguity thus becomes an implicit delegation of rulemaking authority, and that authority is used not to find the best meaning of the text, but to formulate legally binding rules to fill in gaps based on policy judgments made by the agency rather than Congress.

And this is just the thing: SOPRA would bring far-more-valuable predictability and longevity to our legal system by imposing a system of accountability on the agencies. Currently, commissions often believe they can act with impunity (until the next election at least), and even the intended constraints of the APA frequently won’t do much to tether their whims to statute or law if they’re intent on deviating. Having a known constraint (or, at least, a reliable process by which judicial constraint may be imposed) on their behavior will make them think twice about exactly how legally and economically sound proposed rules and other actions are.

The administrative state isn’t going away, even if SOPRA were passed; it will continue to be the source of the majority of the rules under which our economy operates. We have long believed that a benefit of our judicial system is its consistency and relative lack of politicization. If this is a benefit for interpreting laws when agencies aren’t involved, it should also be a benefit when they are involved. Particularly as more and more law emanates from agencies rather than Congress, the oversight of largely neutral judicial arbiters is an essential check on the administrative apparatus’ “accumulation of all powers.”

The interest of judges tends to include a respect for the development of precedent that yields consistent and transparent rules for all future litigants and, more broadly, for economic actors and consumers making decisions in the shadow of the law. This is markedly distinct from agencies which, more often than not, promote the particular, shifting, and often-narrow political sentiments of the day.

Whether a Republican- or a Democrat— appointed district judge reviews an agency action, that judge will be bound (more or less) by the precedent that came before, regardless of the judge’s individual political preferences. Contrast this with the FCC’s decision to reclassify broadband as a Title II service, for example, where previously it had been committed to the idea that broadband was an information service, subject to an entirely different — and far less onerous — regulatory regime. Of course, the next FCC Chairman may feel differently, and nothing would stop another regulatory shift back to the pre-OIO status quo. Perhaps more troublingly, the enormous discretion afforded by courts under current standards of review would permit the agency to endlessly tweak its rules — forbearing from some regulations but not others, un-forbearing, re-interpreting, etc., with precious few judicial standards available to bring certainty to the rules or to ensure their fealty to the statute or the sound economics that is supposed to undergird administrative decisionmaking.

SOPRA, or a bill like it, would have required the Commission to actually be accountable for its historical regulations, and would force it to undergo at least rudimentary economic analysis to justify its actions. This form of accountability can only be to the good.

The genius of our system is its (potential) respect for the rule of law. This is an issue that both sides of the aisle should be able to get behind: minority status is always just one election cycle away. We should all hope to see SOPRA — or some bill like it — gain traction, rooted in long-overdue reflection on just how comfortable we are as a polity with a bureaucratic system increasingly driven by unaccountable discretion.

Last week concluded round 3 of Congressional hearings on mergers in the healthcare provider and health insurance markets. Much like the previousrounds, the hearing saw predictable representatives, of predictable constituencies, saying predictable things.

The pattern is pretty clear: The American Hospital Association (AHA) makesthecase that mergers in the provider market are good for consumers, while mergers in the health insurance market are bad. A scholarortwodecries all consolidation in both markets. Another interested group, like maybe the American Medical Association (AMA), alsocriticizes the mergers. And it’s usually left to a representative of the insurance industry, typically one or more of the mergingparties themselves, or perhaps a scholar from a free marketthink tank, to defend the merger.

Lurking behind the public and politicized airings of these mergers, and especially the pending Anthem/Cigna and Aetna/Humana health insurance mergers, is the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Unfortunately, the partisan politics surrounding the ACA, particularly during this election season, may be trumping the sensible economic analysis of the competitive effects of these mergers.

In particular, the partisan assessments of the ACA’s effect on the marketplace have greatly colored the Congressional (mis-)understandings of the competitive consequences of the mergers.

Witness testimony and questions from members of Congress at the hearings suggest that there is widespread agreement that the ACA is encouraging increased consolidation in healthcare provider markets, for example, but there is nothing approaching unanimity of opinion in Congress or among interested parties regarding what, if anything, to do about it. Congressional Democrats, for their part, have insisted that stepped up vigilance, particularly of health insurance mergers, is required to ensure that continued competition in health insurance markets isn’t undermined, and that the realization of the ACA’s objectives in the provider market aren’t undermined by insurance companies engaging in anticompetitive conduct. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans have generally been inclined to imply (or outright state) that increased concentration is bad, so that they can blame increasing concentration and any lack of competition on the increased regulatory costs or other effects of the ACA. Both sides appear to be missing the greater complexities of the story, however.

While the ACA may be creating certain impediments in the health insurance market, it’s also creating some opportunities for increased health insurance competition, and implementing provisions that should serve to hold down prices. Furthermore, even if the ACA is encouraging more concentration, those increases in concentration can’t be assumed to be anticompetitive. Mergers may very well be the best way for insurers to provide benefits to consumers in a post-ACA world — that is, the world we live in. The ACA may have plenty of negative outcomes, and there may be reasons to attack the ACA itself, but there is no reason to assume that any increased concentration it may bring about is a bad thing.

Asking the right questions about the ACA

We don’t need more self-serving and/or politicized testimony We need instead to apply an economic framework to the competition issues arising from these mergers in order to understand their actual, likely effects on the health insurance marketplace we have. This framework has to answer questions like:

How do we understand the effects of the ACA on the marketplace?

In what ways does the ACA require us to alter our understanding of the competitive environment in which health insurance and healthcare are offered?

Does the ACA promote concentration in health insurance markets?

If so, is that a bad thing?

Do efficiencies arise from increased integration in the healthcare provider market?

Do efficiencies arise from increased integration in the health insurance market?

How do state regulatory regimes affect the understanding of what markets are at issue, and what competitive effects are likely, for antitrust analysis?

What are the potential competitive effects of increased concentration in the health care markets?

Beginning with this post, at least a few of us here at TOTM will take on some of these issues, as part of a blog series aimed at better understanding the antitrust law and economics of the pending health insurance mergers.

Today, we will focus on the ambiguous competitive implications of the ACA. Although not a comprehensive analysis, in this post we will discuss some key insights into how the ACA’s regulations and subsidies should inform our assessment of the competitiveness of the healthcare industry as a whole, and the antitrust review of health insurance mergers in particular.

The ambiguous effects of the ACA

It’s an understatement to say that the ACA is an issue of great political controversy. While many Democrats argue that it has been nothing but a boon to consumers, Republicans usually have nothing good to say about the law’s effects. But both sides miss important but ambiguous effects of the law on the healthcare industry. And because they miss (or disregard) this ambiguity for political reasons, they risk seriously misunderstanding the legal and economic implications of the ACA for healthcare industry mergers.

To begin with, there are substantial negative effects, of course. Requiring insurance companies to accept patients with pre-existing conditions reduces the ability of insurance companies to manage risk. This has led to upward pricing pressure for premiums. While the mandate to buy insurance was supposed to help bring more young, healthy people into the risk pool, so far the projected signups haven’t been realized.

Further, some of the ACA’s effects have decidedly ambiguous consequences for healthcare and health insurance markets. On the one hand, for example, the ACA’s compensation rules have encouraged consolidation among healthcare providers, as noted. One reason for this is that the government gives higher payments for Medicare services delivered by a hospital versus an independent doctor. Similarly, increased regulatory burdens have led to higher compliance costs and more consolidation as providers attempt to economize on those costs. All of this has happened perhaps to the detriment of doctors (and/or patients) who wanted to remain independent from hospitals and larger health network systems, and, as a result, has generally raised costs for payors like insurers and governments.

But much of this consolidation has also arguably led to increased efficiency and greater benefits for consumers. For instance, the integration of healthcare networks leads to increased sharing of health information and better analytics, better care for patients, reduced overhead costs, and other efficiencies. Ultimately these should translate into higher quality care for patients. And to the extent that they do, they should also translate into lower costs for insurers and lower premiums — provided health insurers are not prevented from obtaining sufficient bargaining power to impose pricing discipline on healthcare providers.

In other words, both the AHA and AMA could be right as to different aspects of the ACA’s effects.

Understanding mergers within the regulatory environment

But what they can’t say is that increased consolidation per se is clearly problematic, nor that, even if it is correlated with sub-optimal outcomes, it is consolidation causing those outcomes, rather than something else (like the ACA) that is causing both the sub-optimal outcomes as well as consolidation.

In fact, it may well be the case that increased consolidation improves overall outcomes in healthcare provider and health insurance markets relative to what would happen under the ACA absent consolidation. For Congressional Democrats and others interested in bolstering the ACA and offering the best possible outcomes for consumers, reflexively challenging health insurance mergers because consolidation is “bad,” may be undermining both of these objectives.

Meanwhile, and for the same reasons, Congressional Republicans who decry Obamacare should be careful that they do not likewise condemn mergers under what amounts to a “big is bad” theory that is inconsistent with the rigorous law and economics approach that they otherwise generally support. To the extent that the true target is not health insurance industry consolidation, but rather underlying regulatory changes that have encouraged that consolidation, scoring political points by impugning mergers threatens both health insurance consumers in the short run, as well as consumers throughout the economy in the long run (by undermining the well-established economic critiques of a reflexive “big is bad” response).

It is simply not clear that ACA-induced health insurance mergers are likely to be anticompetitive. In fact, because the ACA builds on state regulation of insurance providers, requiring greater transparency and regulatory review of pricing and coverage terms, it seems unlikely that health insurers would be free to engage in anticompetitive price increases or reduced coverage that could harm consumers.

On the contrary, the managerial and transactional efficiencies from the proposed mergers, combined with greater bargaining power against now-larger providers are likely to lead to both better quality care and cost savings passed-on to consumers. Increased entry, at least in part due to the ACA in most of the markets in which the merging companies will compete, along with integrated health networks themselves entering and threatening entry into insurance markets, will almost certainly lead to more consumer cost savings. In the current regulatory environment created by the ACA, in other words, insurance mergers have considerable upside potential, with little downside risk.

Conclusion

In sum, regardless of what one thinks about the ACA and its likely effects on consumers, it is not clear that health insurance mergers, especially in a post-ACA world, will be harmful.

Rather, assessing the likely competitive effects of health insurance mergers entails consideration of many complicated (and, unfortunately, politicized) issues. In future blog posts we will discuss (among other things): the proper treatment of efficiencies arising from health insurance mergers, the appropriate geographic and product markets for health insurance merger reviews, the role of state regulations in assessing likely competitive effects, and the strengths and weaknesses of arguments for potential competitive harms arising from the mergers.

Remember when net neutrality wasn’t going to involve rate regulation and it was crazy to say that it would? Or that it wouldn’t lead to regulation of edge providers? Or that it was only about the last mile and not interconnection? Well, if the early petitions and complaints are a preview of more to come, the Open Internet Order may end up having the FCC regulating rates for interconnection and extending the reach of its privacy rules to edge providers.

On Monday, Consumer Watchdog petitioned the FCC to not only apply Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) rules originally meant for telephone companies to ISPs, but to also start a rulemaking to require edge providers to honor Do Not Track requests in order to “promote broadband deployment” under Section 706. Of course, we warned of this possibility in our joint ICLE-TechFreedom legal comments:

For instance, it is not clear why the FCC could not, through Section 706, mandate “network level” copyright enforcement schemes or the DNS blocking that was at the heart of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). . . Thus, it would appear that Section 706, as re-interpreted by the FCC, would, under the D.C. Circuit’s Verizon decision, allow the FCC sweeping power to regulate the Internet up to and including (but not beyond) the process of “communications” on end-user devices. This could include not only copyright regulation but everything from cybersecurity to privacy to technical standards. (emphasis added).

While the merits of Do Not Track are debatable, it is worth noting that privacy regulation can go too far and actually drastically change the Internet ecosystem. In fact, it is actually a plausible scenario that overregulating data collection online could lead to the greater use of paywalls to access content. This may actually be a greater threat to Internet Openness than anything ISPs have done.

And then yesterday, the first complaint under the new Open Internet rule was brought against Time Warner Cable by a small streaming video company called Commercial Network Services. According to several newsstories, CNS “plans to file a peering complaint against Time Warner Cable under the Federal Communications Commission’s new network-neutrality rules unless the company strikes a free peering deal ASAP.” In other words, CNS is asking for rate regulation for interconnection. Under the Open Internet Order, the FCC can rule on such complaints, but it can only rule on a case-by-case basis. Either TWC assents to free peering, or the FCC intervenes and sets the rate for them, or the FCC dismisses the complaint altogether and pushes such decisions down the road.

This was another predictable development that many critics of the Open Internet Order warned about: there was no way to really avoid rate regulation once the FCC reclassified ISPs. While the FCC could reject this complaint, it is clear that they have the ability to impose de facto rate regulation through case-by-case adjudication. Whether it is rate regulation according to Title II (which the FCC ostensibly didn’t do through forbearance) is beside the point. This will have the same practical economic effects and will be functionally indistinguishable if/when it occurs.

In sum, while neither of these actions were contemplated by the FCC (they claim), such abstract rules are going to lead to random complaints like these, and companies are going to have to use the “ask FCC permission” process to try to figure out beforehand whether they should be investing or whether they’re going to be slammed. As Geoff Manne said in Wired:

That’s right—this new regime, which credits itself with preserving “permissionless innovation,” just put a bullet in its head. It puts innovators on notice, and ensures that the FCC has the authority (if it holds up in court) to enforce its vague rule against whatever it finds objectionable.

I mean, I don’t wanna brag or nothin, but it seems to me that we critics have been right so far. The reclassification of broadband Internet service as Title II has had the (supposedly) unintended consequence of sweeping in far more (both in scope of application and rules) than was supposedly bargained for. Hopefully the FCC rejects the petition and the complaint and reverses this course before it breaks the Internet.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) subjects government-imposed burdens on religious exercise to strict scrutiny. In particular, the Act provides that “[g]overnment shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability” unless the government can establish that doing so is the least restrictive means of furthering a “compelling government interest.”

So suppose a for-profit corporation’s stock is owned entirely by evangelical Christians with deeply held religious objections to abortion. May our federal government force the company to provide abortifacients to its employees? That’s the central issue in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, which the Supreme Court will soon decide. As is so often the case, resolution of the issue turns on a seemingly mundane matter: Is a for-profit corporation a “person” for purposes of RFRA?

In an amicus brief filed in the case, a group of forty-four corporate and criminal law professors argued that treating corporations as RFRA persons would contradict basic principles of corporate law. Specifically, they asserted that corporations are distinct legal entities from their shareholders, who enjoy limited liability behind a corporate veil and cannot infect the corporation with their own personal religious views. The very nature of a corporation, the scholars argued, precludes shareholders from exercising their religion in corporate form. Thus, for-profit corporations can’t be “persons” for purposes of RFRA.

In what amounts to an epic takedown of the law professor amici, William & Mary law professors Alan Meese and Nathan Oman have published an article explaining why for-profit corporations are, in fact, RFRA persons. Their piece in the Harvard Law Review Forum responds methodically to the key points made by the law professor amici and to a few other arguments against granting corporations free exercise rights.

Among the arguments that Meese and Oman ably rebut are:

Religious freedom applies only to natural persons.

Corporations are simply instrumentalities by which people act in the world, Meese and Oman observe. Indeed, they are nothing more than nexuses of contracts, provided in standard form but highly tailorable by those utilizing them. “When individuals act religiously using corporations they are engaged in religious exercise. When we regulate corporations, we in fact burden the individuals who use the corporate form to pursue their goals.”

Given the essence of a corporation, which separates ownership and control, for-profit corporations can’t exercise religion in accordance with the views of their stockholders.

This claim is simply false. First, it is possible — pretty easy, in fact — to unite ownership and control in a corporation. Business planners regularly do so using shareholder agreements, and many states, including Delaware, explicitly allow for shareholder management of close corporations. Second, scads of for-profit corporations engage in religiously motivated behavior — i.e., religious exercise. Meese and Oman provide a nice litany of examples (with citations omitted here):

A kosher supermarket owned by Orthodox Jews challenged Massachusetts’ Sunday closing laws in 1960. For seventy years, the Ukrops Supermarket chain in Virginia closed on Sundays, declined to sell alcohol, and encouraged employees to worship weekly. A small grocery store in Minneapolis with a Muslim owner prepares halal meat and avoids taking loans that require payment of interest prohibited by Islamic law. Chick-fil-A, whose mission statement promises to “glorify God,” is closed on Sundays. A deli that complied with the kosher standards of its Conservative Jewish owners challenged the Orthodox definition of kosher found in New York’s kosher food law, echoing a previous challenge by a different corporation of a similar New Jersey law. Tyson Foods employs more than 120 chaplains as part of its effort to maintain a “faith-friendly” culture. New York City is home to many Kosher supermarkets that close two hours before sundown on Friday and do not reopen until Sunday. A fast-food chain prints citations of biblical verses on its packaging and cups. A Jewish entrepreneur in Brooklyn runs a gas station and coffee shop that serves only Kosher food. Hobby Lobby closes on Sundays and plays Christian music in its stores. The company provides employees with free access to chaplains, spiritual counseling, and religiously themed financial advice. Moreover, the company does not sell shot glasses, refuses to allow its trucks to “backhaul” beer, and lost $3.3 million after declining to lease an empty building to a liquor store.

As these examples illustrate, the assertion by lower courts that “for-profit, secular corporations cannot engage in religious exercise” is just empirically false.

Allowing for-profit corporations to have religious beliefs would create intracorporate conflicts that would reduce the social value of the corporate form of business.

The corporate and criminal law professor amici described a parade of horribles that would occur if corporations were deemed RFRA persons. They insisted, for example, that RFRA protection would inject religion into a corporation in a way that “could make the raising of capital more challenging, recruitment of employees more difficult, and entrepreneurial energy less likely to flourish.” In addition, they said, RFRA protection “would invite contentious shareholder meetings, disruptive proxy contests, and expensive litigation regarding whether the corporations should adopt a religion and, if so, which one.”

But actual experience suggests there’s no reason to worry about such speculative harms. As Meese and Oman observe, we’ve had lots of experience with this sort of thing: Federal and state laws already allow for-profit corporations to decline to perform or pay for certain medical procedures if they have religious or moral objections. From the Supreme Court’s 1963 Sherbert decision to its 1990 Smith decision, strict scrutiny applied to governmental infringements on corporations’ religious exercise. A number of states have enacted their own versions of RFRA, most of which apply to corporations. Thus, “[f]or over half a century, … there has been no per se bar to free exercise claims by for-profit corporations, and the parade of horribles envisioned by the [law professor amici] has simply not materialized.” Indeed, “the scholars do not cite a single example of a corporate governance dispute connected to [corporate] decisions [related to religious exercise].”

Permitting for-profit corporations to claim protection under RFRA will lead to all sorts of false claims of religious belief in an attempt to evade government regulation.

The law professor amici suggest that affording RFRA protection to for-profit corporations may allow such companies to evade regulatory requirements by manufacturing a religious identity. They argue that “[c]ompanies suffering a competitive disadvantage [because of a government regulation] will simply claim a ‘Road to Damascus’ conversion. A company will adopt a board resolution asserting a religious belief inconsistent with whatever regulation they find obnoxious . . . .”

As Meese and Oman explain, however, this problem is not unique to for-profit corporations. Natural persons may also assert insincere religious claims, and courts may need to assess sincerity to determine if free exercise rights are being violated. The law professor amici contend that it would be unprecedented for courts to assess whether religious beliefs are asserted in “good faith.” But the Supreme Court decision the amici cite in support of that proposition, Meese and Oman note, held only that courts lack competence to evaluate the truth of theological assertions or the accuracy of a particular litigant’s interpretation of his faith. “This task is entirely separate … from the question of whether a litigant’s asserted religious beliefs are sincerely held. Courts applying RFRA have not infrequently evaluated such sincerity.”

***

In addition to rebutting the foregoing arguments (and several others) against treating for-profit corporations as RFRA persons, Meese and Oman set forth a convincing affirmative argument based on the plain text of the statute and the Dictionary Act. I’ll let you read that one on your own.

I’ll also point interested readers to Steve Bainbridge’s fantastic work on this issue. Here is his critique of the corporate and criminal law professors’ amicus brief. Here is his proposal for using the corporate law doctrine of reverse veil piercing to assess a for-profit corporation’s religious beliefs.

Mike Sykuta and I, both proud Missourians, recently took to the opinion section of the Kansas City Star to discuss pending state legislation that would bar automobile manufacturers from operating their own retail outlets in the Show Me state. The immediate target of the bill is Tesla, but the bigger concern of the auto dealers, who drafted the statutory language we criticize, is that the big carmakers will bypass independent dealers and start running their own retail outlets.

The arguments in our op-ed will be familiar to TOTM readers. We begin with three fundamental points: (1) Distribution is an “input” for carmakers. (2) Producers, if left to their own devices, will choose the more efficient option when deciding whether to “buy” the distribution input (i.e., to sell through independent dealers, who pay a discounted wholesale price) or “make” it (i.e., to operate their own retail outlets and charge the higher retail price). (3) Consumers — who ultimately pay all input costs, including the cost of distribution — will benefit if the most efficient option is selected. In short, the interests of carmakers and consumers are aligned here: both benefit from implementation of the most efficient distribution scheme.

We then rebut the arguments that a direct distribution ban is needed to break up monopoly power, to assure adequate aftermarket servicing of vehicles, or to encourage appropriate safety recalls. (On these points, we draw heavily from International Center for Law & Economics’ letter to Gov. Chris Christie regarding New Jersey’s proposed anti-Tesla legislation.)

Our TOTM colleague Dan Crane has written a few posts here over the past year or so about attempts by the automobile dealers lobby (and General Motors itself) to restrict the ability of Tesla Motors to sell its vehicles directly to consumers (see here, here and here). Following New Jersey’s adoption of an anti-Tesla direct distribution ban, more than 70 lawyers and economists–including yours truly and several here at TOTM–submitted an open letter to Gov. Chris Christie explaining why the ban is bad policy.

Now it seems my own state of Missouri is getting caught up in the auto dealers’ ploy to thwart pro-consumer innovation and competition. Legislation (HB1124) that was intended to simply update statutes governing the definition, licensing and use of off-road and utility vehicles got co-opted at the last minute in the state Senate. Language was inserted to redefine the term “franchisor” to include any automobile manufacturer, regardless whether they have any franchise agreements–in direct contradiction to the definition used throughout the rest of the surrounding statues. The bill defines a “franchisor” as:

“any manufacturer of new motor vehicles which establishes any business location or facility within the state of Missouri, when such facilities are used by the manufacturer to inform, entice, or otherwise market to potential customers, or where customer orders for the manufacturer’s new motor vehicles are placed, received, or processed, whether or not any sales of such vehicles are finally consummated, and whether or not any such vehicles are actually delivered to the retail customer, at such business location or facility.”

In other words, it defines a franchisor as a company that chooses to open it’s own facility and not franchise. The bill then goes on to define any facility or business location meeting the above criteria as a “new motor vehicle dealership,” even though no sales or even distribution may actually take place there. Since “franchisors” are already forbidden from owning a “new motor vehicle dealership” in Missouri (a dubious restriction in itself), these perverted definitions effectively ban a company like Tesla from selling directly to consumers.

The bill still needs to go back to the Missouri House of Representatives, where it started out as addressing “laws regarding ‘all-terrain vehicles,’ ‘recreational off-highway vehicles,’ and ‘utility vehicles’.”

This is classic rent-seeking regulation at its finest, using contrived and contorted legislation–not to mention last-minute, underhanded legislative tactics–to prevent competition and innovation that, as General Motors itself pointed out, is based on a more economically efficient model of distribution that benefits consumers. Hopefully the State House…or the Governor…won’t be asleep at the wheel as this legislation speeds through the final days of the session.

Once again, my constitutional law professor has embarrassed me with his gross misunderstanding of the U.S. Constitution. First, he insisted that it would be “unprecedented” for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a statute enacted by a “democratically elected Congress.” Seventh-grade Civics students know that’s not right, but Mr. Obama’s misstatement did have its intended effect: It sent a clear signal that the President and his lackeys would call into question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court should it invalidate the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Duly warned, Chief Justice Roberts changed his vote in NFIB v. Sebelius to save the Court from whatever institutional damage Mr. Obama would have inflicted.

Now President Obama – who chastised his predecessor for offending the constitutional order and insisted that he, a former constitutional law professor, would never stoop so low – has both violated his oath of office and flouted a key constitutional feature, the separation of powers. I’m speaking of the President’s “administrative fix” to the ACA. That “fix” consists of a presidential order not to enforce the Act’s minimum coverage provisions, a move that President Obama says will allow insurance companies to continue offering ACA non-compliant policies to those previously enrolled in them if the companies wish to do so and are able to obtain permission at the state level.

This is, of course, nothing more than a transparent attempt to shift blame for the millions of recently canceled policies. Having priced their more generous ACA-compliant policies on the assumption that there would be an influx of healthy customers now covered by high-deductible, non-compliant policies, insurance companies would shoot themselves in the foot by accepting Mr. Obama’s generous “offer.” Moreover, state insurance commissioners, aware of the adverse selection likely to result from this last-minute rule change, are unlikely to give their blessing. (Indeed, several have balked – including the D.C. insurance commissioner, who was promptly fired.)

But putting aside the fact that the administrative fix won’t work, the main problem with it is that it is blatantly unconstitutional. The Constitution divides power between the three branches of government. Article I grants to the Congress “all legislative Powers,” including “Power to lay and collect Taxes.” Article II then directs the President to “take Care that the laws be faithfully executed.” With his administrative fix, President Obama has essentially said, “I promise not to execute the law Congress passed.”

Moreover, the President went further to say, “I promise not to collect a tax the Congress imposed.” Remember that the penalty for failure to carry ACA-compliant insurance is, for constitutional purposes, a tax. That was the central holding of last summer’s Obamacare decision, NFIB v. Sebelius. When the President assured victims of insurance cancellations that he would turn a blind eye to the law and allow their insurers to continue to offer canceled policies, he also implied that he would order his administration not to collect the taxes owed by those in ACA-noncompliant policies. Indeed, this matter was clarified in the letter the Department of Health and Human Services sent to state insurance commissioners notifying them of the Obama Administration’s decision not to enforce the law as written. That letter stated that the Department of the Treasury, which is charged (through the IRS) with collecting the ACA’s penalties/taxes, “concur[red] with the transitional relief afforded in this document.” That means the IRS, pursuant to the President’s order, is promising not to collect a tax the Congress has imposed.

This, my friends, is a major disruption of the constitutional order. If the President of the United States may simply decide not to collect taxes imposed by the branch of government that has been given exclusive “Power to lay and collect Taxes,” the whole Constitution is thrown off-kilter. Any time a president wanted to favor some individuals, firms, or industries, he wouldn’t need to go to Congress for approval. No, he could just order his IRS not to collect taxes from those folks. Can’t get Congress to approve subsidies for green technologies? No worries. Just order your IRS not to collect taxes from firms in that sector. Or maybe even order a refundable tax credit. You think Congress has enacted job-killing regulations on an industry? Just invoke your enforcement discretion and ignore those rules. Whew! This sure makes things easier.

President Obama twice promised, under oath, to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Unfortunately, he also rammed through a terrible law. Our Constitution now gives him the option to enforce the enacted law and pay the political price, or seek Congress’s assistance to change the law. On the particular matter at issue here, Congress is willing to help the President out. On Friday, the House of Representatives voted to amend the law to allow insurance companies to continue to offer ACA non-compliant policies. Mr. Obama doesn’t like some details of the legislative fix he’s been offered. Unfortunately for him, though, he’s not a king. He has to work within the constitutional order.

Like most libertarians I’m concerned about government abuse of power. Certainly the secrecy and seeming reach of the NSA’s information gathering programs is worrying. But we can’t and shouldn’t pretend like there are no countervailing concerns (as Gordon Crovitz points out). And we certainly shouldn’t allow the fervent ire of the most radical voices — those who view the issue solely from one side — to impel technology companies to take matters into their own hands. At least not yet.

Rather, the issue is inherently political. And while the political process is far from perfect, I’m almost as uncomfortable with the radical voices calling for corporations to “do something,” without evincing any nuanced understanding of the issues involved.

Frankly, I see this as of a piece with much of the privacy debate that points the finger at corporations for collecting data (and ignores the value of their collection of data) while identifying government use of the data they collect as the actual problem. Typically most of my cyber-libertarian friends are with me on this: If the problem is the government’s use of data, then attack that problem; don’t hamstring corporations and the benefits they confer on consumers for the sake of a problem that is not of their making and without regard to the enormous costs such a solution imposes.

Verizon, unlike just about every other technology company, seems to get this. In a recent speech, John Stratton, head of Verizon’s Enterprise Solutions unit, had this to say:

“This is not a question that will be answered by a telecom executive, this is not a question that will be answered by an IT executive. This is a question that must be answered by societies themselves.”

“I believe this is a bigger issue, and press releases and fizzy statements don’t get at the issue; it needs to be solved by society.”

Stratton said that as a company, Verizon follows the law, and those laws are set by governments.

“The laws are not set by Verizon, they are set by the governments in which we operate. I think its important for us to recognise that we participate in debate, as citizens, but as a company I have obligations that I am going to follow.“

I completely agree. There may be a problem, but before we deputize corporations in the service of even well-meaning activism, shouldn’t we address this as the political issue it is first?

I find it interesting that the “blame” for privacy incursions by the government is being laid at Google’s feet. Google isn’t doing the . . . incursioning, and we wouldn’t have to saddle Google with any costs of protection (perhaps even lessening functionality) if we just nipped the problemin the bud. Importantly, the implication here is that government should not have access to the information in question–a decision that sounds inherently political to me. I’m just a little surprised to hear anyone (other than me) saying that corporations should take it upon themselves to “fix” government policy by, in effect, destroying records.

But at the same time, it makes some sense to look to Google to ameliorate these costs. Google is, after all, responsive to market forces, and (once in a while) I’m sure markets respond to consumer preferences more quickly and effectively than politicians do. And if Google perceives that offering more protection for its customers can be more cheaply done by restraining the government than by curtailing its own practices, then Dan [Solove]’s suggestion that Google take the lead in lobbying for greater legislative protections of personal information may come to pass. Of course we’re still left with the problem of Google and not the politicians bearing the cost of their folly (if it is folly).

As I said then, there may be a role for tech companies to take the lead in lobbying for changes. And perhaps that’s what’s happening. But the impetus behind it — the implicit threats from civil liberties groups, the position that there can be no countervailing benefits from the government’s use of this data, the consistent view that corporations should be forced to deal with these political problems, and the predictable capitulation (and subsequent grandstanding, as Stratton calls it) by these companies is not the right way to go.

I applaud Verizon’s stance here. Perhaps as a society we should come out against some or all of the NSA’s programs. But ideological moralizing and corporate bludgeoning aren’t the way to get there.

Over at the blog for the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property, Richard Epstein has posted a lengthy essay that critiques the Obama Administration’s decision this past August 3 to veto the exclusion order issued by the International Trade Commission (ITC) in the Samsung v. Apple dispute filed there (ITC Investigation No. 794). In his essay, The Dangerous Adventurism of the United States Trade Representative: Lifting the Ban against Apple Products Unnecessarily Opens a Can of Worms in Patent Law, Epstein rightly identifies how the 3-page letter issued to the ITC creates tremendous institutional and legal troubles in the name an unverified theory about “patent holdup” invoked in the name of an equally overgeneralized and vague belief in the “public interest.”

Here’s a taste:

The choice in question here thus boils down to whether the low rate of voluntary failure justifies the introduction of an expensive and error-filled judicial process that gives all parties the incentive to posture before a public agency that has more business than it can possibly handle. It is on this matter critical to remember that all standards issues are not the same as this particularly nasty, high-stake dispute between two behemoths whose vital interests make this a highly atypical standard-setting dispute. Yet at no point in the Trade Representative’s report is there any mention of how this mega-dispute might be an outlier. Indeed, without so much as a single reference to its own limited institutional role, the decision uses a short three-page document to set out a dogmatic position on issues on which there is, as I have argued elsewhere, good reason to be suspicious of the overwrought claims of the White House on a point that is, to say the least, fraught with political intrigue

Ironically, there was, moreover a way to write this opinion that could have narrowed the dispute and exposed for public deliberation a point that does require serious consideration. The thoughtful dissenting opinion of Commissioner Pinkert pointed the way. Commissioner Pinkert contended that the key factor weighing against granting Samsung an exclusion order is that Samsung in its FRAND negotiations demanded from Apple rights to use certain non standard-essential patents as part of the overall deal. In this view, the introduction of nonprice terms on nonstandard patterns represents an abuse of the FRAND standard. Assume for the moment that this contention is indeed correct, and the magnitude of the problem is cut a hundred or a thousand fold. This particular objection is easy to police and companies will know that they cannot introduce collateral matters into their negotiations over standards, at which point the massive and pointless overkill of the Trade Representative’s order is largely eliminated. No longer do we have to treat as gospel truth the highly dubious assertions about the behavior of key parties to standard-setting disputes.

But is Pinkert correct? On the one side, it is possible to invoke a monopoly leverage theory similar to that used in some tie-in cases to block this extension. But those theories are themselves tricky to apply, and the counter argument could well be that the addition of new terms expands the bargaining space and thus increases the likelihood of an agreement. To answer that question to my mind requires some close attention to the actual and customary dynamics of these negotiations, which could easily vary across different standards. I would want to reserve judgment on a question this complex, and I think that the Trade Representative would have done everyone a great service if he had addressed the hard question. But what we have instead is a grand political overgeneralization that reflects a simple-minded and erroneous view of current practices.

You can read the essay at CPIP’s blog here, or you can download a PDF of the white paper version here (please feel free to distribute digitally or in hardcopy).